Everyone here in Administration would like to wish all of you a happy Winter, as the temperature in North Texas plummeted overnight to something resembling 35 degrees, with the wind chill factor included. I’d also like to thank all of my digital apps for not warning me that stepping outside in my normal clothes would feel a lot like someone giving me an icicle enema. Siri, you’re on thin ice.
The Bunker Mascot is particularly excited, being a fan of winter weather in general. She has been straining at the leash to do some old-school zooming, like back in the day, and is frustrated with us because we won’t let her, knowing she’ll take off, catapult forward for about six feet, and then her back legs will give out and she will fall, ass first, on the ground, and the look around at us as if to say, “What the hell was that?” I really wish sometimes she had one of those voice boxes like the dog in Up.
Wakanda Forever
It’s been a while since the Marvel Cinematic Universe has really delivered for me; not that Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wasn’t personally awesome, but it felt a little like insider baseball, kind of pop culturally claustrophobic. We’re deep in Strange’s corner of things, and it showed. But Black Panther: Wakanda Forever felt a lot like Phase 3 MCU, with tons of world-building and a lot of really confident flexing that you find in the best sequels in the series, like Captain America: Winter Soldier.
It's the best Marvel movie I’ve seen in a while, and I hope you go see it in theaters. It’s heavy in places—the opening is brutal. The first half hour is brutal, in fact. They deal with Boseman’s death head on, no flinching, and it’s pretty obvious what he’s dying from, too. The opening sequence, the funeral, all of it—very triggering for me, probably moreso because Cathy loved the first Black Panther movie and watched it several times. But whereas Thor: Love and Thunder just made me uncomfortable, this attempt to deal with cancer in the MCU was, oddly, almost cathartic. I can’t explain it. And thankfully, that’s not what the whole movie is about, but there is an obvious Boseman-shaped Negative Space Absence in nearly every scene. The whole cast and crew deserve props for finding ways to rise above it, use it, transcend it, do what they had to do to deliver a spectacle.
Short and Sweet
Deadlines loom. I’ve got lots of irons in the fire. The Kickstarter continues apace. I’m working on a paper for a book about Robert E. Howard, to be published by Texas A&M Press. And I’m waiting to see if I’m going to be co-editing an anthology, about which I can say very little at the moment. All this with The Holidays looming like a big, ungainly thing that looms.